Elgin stood in front of the taller, much younger, man who stared off into the ever present nothing in his office. The man’s suit was clean and freshly pressed that morning, were he to guess, and his crisp white cuffs at the ends of his equally white sleeves jutted out from his suit jacket in defiance of Richmond’s gray, hazy, and overcast winter day.
Reaching out, he touched one wide, callous roughened fingertip to Tamir’s face, tracing the line from his prominent browline down to his cheekbone and from there to his jaw and sighed. There was just the faintest echo, a hint of resonance, that told Elgin that this young, handsome man was a direct descendant of his. From the slight almond shape of his eyes, and the general look of the man, he would bet that Tamir was some ultimate grandchild of his and his long ago spouse, Nuchd. She had been the Goddess of the Night Sky to their people in those long forgotten times.
This made Tamir also a grandson of his own grandson, Amra, though the man was so far distant from himself he doubted he could ever convince Amra the man was kin. Amra, despite his power, lacked the sensitivity to feel that kind of faint connection. Once upon a time, Elgin thought it might have been why Amra and some others of his line lacked empathy. Almost every line of his “Children” had sprouted prominent exemplars who lacked that connection to humanity. Some of them had famously lacked that connection to their direct siblings; those were the worst of the Gods of War throughout the ages.
But, thankfully, those were only one, or two, in a given generation.
At Elgin’s age, counting the generations between one grandchild and another was pointless beyond the tenth generation. It was like counting individual inches beyond something a hundred kilometers away. As long as you know it’s there, it’s pointless to worry about naming those extra inches, and so he tended to think of most of his progeny beyond a single generation as simply “Grandchild.” Too many “Great”s just slowed the conversation to a crawl. Even immortals didn’t have time for that level of pedancy.
Seeing the glazed over eyes of the young man made him sigh again.
Elgin hated to see such beauty twisted to follow lies; but he had long ago, eons now, given up on correcting people who lived their lives through such false means. They rarely if ever changed their ways, and rarer still changed their beliefs. Even when shown that they were calling a duck a deer, they would fight his instruction and insist the flock of ducks were a herd of deer.
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Changing the world for the better took centuries, and patience. Changing people’s minds? That took miracles, more often than naught.
Having seen the work his grandson, Amra as he went by in this era, had put into retrieving the ‘Tj’Shae boy, Elgin was a little surprised when the man almost dozing before him, Tamir, had simply presented himself at the front door.
Amra had never been one to move a plan ahead by simply sending in an emissary to discuss terms. Now, the terms that Tamir had brought had been laughable, but his grandson had been telling his followers that Amra, himself, was the father of all gods and magic in this world for at least a century now, and so this ambassador had come here to deal with Elgin and his people as though THEY were the ones who lived in rebelion to Amra’s tenets.
Ahoo walked into his office just then, and he smiled at his lovely wife. Elgin felt blessed to have such an amazingly kind woman at his side, and to see her put up with his “nonsense and dreamy plots” as she put it, for several hundred years now was reassuring. He knew she wouldn’t have stayed with him had his plans and dreams for humanity been hollow, or as misguided as he sometimes feared.
She nodded at the relaxed figure of Tamir. He nodded back. Before he could speak, she asked, “Have you figured out what Amra is planning now?”
His face bunched up in pugnacious disappointment. “No.” He said, his deep voice sad. “I feel like he may have sent ‘Tzal at us to distract us. He still thinks in terms of gods and monsters fighting grand battles across the landscape, destroying cities and creating mini-armageddons. But this is not the 9th century BC, and we are not waiting for another Ragnarok, or a new Dance of the Tandava. I doubt anyone on Strawberry Street even heard our fight the other night.”
He smiled sadly at that, trying to will away the tears that threatened just at the back of his vision. Ahoo glided up to him where he sat on the edge of his desk,wrapping her willowy form about his stockier, shorter, less gracile lump of body.
She held him for several minutes, the two of them just breathing together, two people trying to banish the pain and loss they both felt.
“Amra is trying something.” Ahoo’s voice finally cut in, breaking the tranquility. “There is a Behemoth somewhere nearby. On Cary street. I felt him as you were telling that old story you used to tell the girls.”
“Visiting…” Elgin was hopeful, but knew as he looked into his wife’s indigo eyes that it was in vain.
“Chained. And being prodded forward by someone who held the chains like they would a hunting dog’s lead.” She replied. The wiry black hairs on Elgin’s ropey forearms began to stand on end. A warning of a coming storm.
It was then that the roar sounded up and down Cary Street.